OF TENANTS, LIVE IN FRIENDS AND LANDLORDS

Published: May 21, 1983

To the Editor:

A great many New Yorkers were very disturbed by the recent New York State Court of Appeals decision allowing a property owner to evict a tenant who was cohabitating with a gentleman without the landlord's prior consent. v. hat may be surprising to most New Yorkers is that many property owners also consider this decision offensive. Our company, for example, has no intention of intruding into the personal lives of the nearly 30,000 families who live in apartments under our management.

When we rent an apartment to a single person, it is not without an-ticipation that that person is likely to acquire a live-in companion. Unless a companion became unruly, or a large number of additional individuals were to occupy an apartment, we would not object.

In truth, we doubt that any property owner would really get involved in this type of litigation were it not for the oppressive nature of various rent controls, which have pushed owners into a corner and forced them to look for any legal means to better their position.

Just as harmful as the court's invasion of the particular tenant's civil rights was its butchering of the ''escape hatch'' which the State Legislature adopted several years ago to let tenants off the hook for the balance of their lease term where a property owner unreasonably refused their request to sublet or assign.

Instead, the Court of Appeals (as so deliciously described by Sydney Schanberg in a recent column) has created a new class of ''tenant-landlords'' who are reaping extraordinary profits by subleasing their apartments at amounts far in excess of the controlled rents and accepting key money payments for assignment of their leases.

The effect of this is to deprive the buildings of the additional revenues that might be available for their maintenance through normal turnover of tenants, while also depriving tens of thousands of New Yorkers of the opportunity to obtain an apartment at appropriate rents.

All of which goes to prove that the more controls you impose, the more damage is ultimately done to everyone, residents and property owners alike. There is an economic problem that has been obscured by the introduction of a specious issue in which the landlord becomes a self-appointed moral arbiter when all he really ought to want is to be a successful businessman realizing a fair profit on his investment.

I hope that these two glaring examples will open the eyes of some of our Albany legislators to the harm they and the courts have done to the normal relationships that should exist between a property owner and a resident. ROBERT C. ROSENBERG President, Grenadier Realty Corp. New York, May 13, 1983